Learning Dance By Heart

Sitting in on a rehearsal by a professional dance company is a privilege; even seasoned dancegoers rarely see this side of the process, although it makes up the bulk of a dancer’s life. The rehearsal is where details of a dance are worked out, spacing is shored up, and lifts are negotiated; it’s where the movement language is studied and committed to memory. Recently, as part of the River to River Festival, the Trisha Brown Dance Company opened up to the public an hour of its rehearsal of “Astral Converted,” a 1991 work that it will revive at the Park Avenue Armory in July. There will be two more open rehearsals, on June 30th.

The rehearsal took place in Building 110, a former Army warehouse on the northern edge of Governors Island, which the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the lead partner in the River to River Festival, turned into an arts facility two years ago, with artists’ studios, rehearsal rooms, and an exhibition space. The Trisha Brown company is in a three-week residency at Building 110, and their rehearsal space, a room about twenty feet by twenty-five, had rough-hewn stained-wood beams running across the ceiling, and ten windows, five of which looked out on New York Harbor and lower Manhattan beyond. About forty of us crowded along one wall of the studio, half seated on chairs and the other half on the floor, and were warmly welcomed by Diane Madden, who joined the Trisha Brown Dance Company in 1980 and is now its rehearsal director; she would lead the rehearsal with the help of Carolyn Lucas, another longtime former company member, who is now Brown’s choreographic assistant.

A dance rehearsal is often about problem solving. Some spacing concerns arose right away when Sam von Wentz traversed a diagonal from downstage left to upstage right, leaving Leah Morrison in the corner, and was joined by Tamara Riewe and Jamie Scott, and then by the others; the size of the room—smaller than the stage where “Astral Converted” would be performed in July—was causing a traffic jam. With a minimum of fuss, the dancers took care of the issue. The group ran that particular short section, just a few minutes long, over and over. Repetition makes movements, and sequences, so familiar that they become second nature to the dancers. The choreography becomes known. Once internalized, it can be discussed and dissected and, if necessary, altered. It’s difficult to alter something that isn’t known.

When I first saw “Astral Converted,” in 1993, at City Center, both Madden and Lucas were in the piece, as they were in “Astral Convertible,” a precursor, in 1989. I found their continued involvement in Brown’s work and in her company, their dedication to something they loved, to be moving, and their presence in the rehearsal closed a kind of loop for me. I had always made a point of going to Trisha Brown’s seasons in New York back when I danced, and was a fan of Lucas and Madden in particular; onstage, Madden, an elder statesman in the troupe, displayed a generous, nurturing quality and a remarkable clarity, and Lucas’s ethereality always drew my eye. Watching these two teaching younger dancers a work they had helped to create felt like seeing a history of dance unfold.

The gentle openness that I had admired about Trisha’s dancers in the past was with them here, too. Helping Morrison and Scott work through a passage that required very specific placement of the hands and arms, Madden was relaxed and funny; Lucas, showing Tara Lorenzen and Stuart Shugg the proper pace and facing of a duet sequence in which Lorenzen walks slowly into Shugg’s curled-up body on the floor and keeps going, was exact in her approach, the placement of her body precise, her gestures crystalline. When she spoke, even though she was mere feet away, I could barely hear her. She radiated assurance.

That calmness pervaded the room. It comes with the territory of Brown’s work. I was reminded, being so close, how integral breathing is to the movement, how the release of breath leads to the release of the body so that it can move freely. But Brown’s choreography is not merely light and airy; there is frequently a sense of attack, though such movements seem to have impulses rooted deep within the body; the result is a fullness, a roundness, even with a sharp motion. Brown’s work is also deceptive—a simple leaping phrase might start out with an intricate chain reaction of a rotating spine, then turning hips, then legs propelling the body, with the arms and the head held just so in flight—and seeing phrases repeated, and slowed down, allowed us to unpack their complexities. Any dance is made up of millions of minute muscle responses, but some of the phrases in “Astral Converted” comprise so many discrete parts that it makes one appreciate how challenging it must be to remember them. But that’s what rehearsals are for.